I think the importance of creativity today
really reflects a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy. You know, in the old days,
wealth was created because in the industrial era, you manufactured something, you got
economies of scale, you had long production runs, you were really efficient - you know, you
could get a Model T, any color just so long as it was black. Right? So there
was standardization.
And there was a whole set of assumptions about how to manage, how to create an organization - you know, a typical kind
of hierarchical organization - to make sure that things ran smoothly. Well,
that may be great for a relatively stable era of history - relatively stable -
but now things are fundamentally unstable - and so we need less economies of scale and more economies of discovery. Which means
that the management approach, the organizational approach, has got to shift as
well.